Pointers Are Good Too

That moment when you're just trying to write a simple loop but somehow end up implementing cryptographic-grade randomness in C. Nobody plans to become a cryptographer, it just happens while you're debugging pointer arithmetic at 3 AM. The worst part? You'll never be able to reproduce this accidental genius again. Your code is now simultaneously terrible and brilliant—Schrödinger's algorithm.

Expectation: Writing elegant code with perfect structure and original logic. Reality: WHEEEZE *frantically searching through 2000 lines of code at 3am* "I FORGOR SEMICOLON" And then there's that one missing semicolon that keeps you awake for 4 days straight while your non-programmer friends think you're being dramatic. No, Chad, this isn't like when you "missed her" - this is psychological warfare between me and a punctuation mark that Satan himself invented.

The embedded systems world is having a full-blown affair with C/C++ while giving Rust the cold shoulder. Despite Rust's memory safety guarantees and zero-cost abstractions, embedded devs keep crawling back to their toxic exes C and C++. It's like watching someone choose dial-up when fiber is available because "we've always done it this way." The embedded community's relationship status with C/C++ is definitely: "It's complicated" – and by complicated, I mean "refusing to move on despite all the segfaults and buffer overflows."

The existential crisis every developer faces at 2 AM while debugging. We name something a "variable" and then immediately declare it as "const" or "final" or "readonly" - essentially telling it not to vary. The cognitive dissonance is real! It's like naming your pet rock "Runner" or your cactus "Cuddles." No wonder our code gets confused and throws exceptions - we've been gaslighting our variables this whole time!

Behold the evolution of versioning sophistication! From the barbaric simplicity of "1, 2, 3" (did we even have computers back then?), to the refined elegance of "1.0, 1.1, 1.2" that makes project managers feel professional, and finally ascending to godhood with "8086, 80286, 80386" – where you're not just versioning software, you're naming it after the silicon it runs on. Nothing says "I've been in this industry since punch cards" like referencing Intel processors from the 1980s. The true power move isn't semantic versioning – it's naming your releases after increasingly obsolete hardware.

The universal hatred for CMake transcends all intelligence levels! The meme shows an IQ bell curve with people at every point—from 55 to 145—united in their collective trauma of writing CMakeLists.txt files at 3AM while sobbing uncontrollably. The "well ackchyually" guy at the bottom represents that one teammate who claims to understand CMake but still copy-pastes from StackOverflow like the rest of us. Nothing brings C++ developers together like the shared existential dread of finding yourself in dependency hell with zero documentation. It's the build system we all use and absolutely nobody enjoys!